


America Windows

by thestarsjustblinkforus



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-13
Updated: 2013-05-13
Packaged: 2017-12-11 17:09:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/801109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thestarsjustblinkforus/pseuds/thestarsjustblinkforus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Those first chords land and he is transported. He can suddenly feel through his socks, his shoes, the hardwood floors of her flat, cool beneath his bare feet. He can see the sunlight filtering in through the sheer curtains that turned her skin cobalt blue and made him flash on one of the postcards tacked to her wall... the Chagall... It makes his heart convulse, his breath stutter, his knees shake until he thinks he might fall and Watson doesn't know the unmarked CD she has just slipped into the stereo is one of those triggers she used to natter on about. She doesn't know the effort it is taking in this moment to remember blue, to cling to the blue on her skin, the sunlight, the hardwood floor and her hand on his face instead of that violent burning red he almost drowned in, that he always thinks of when he thinks of her now. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	America Windows

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this before Elementary!Irene was revealed to be a painter, so in this story she is an opera singer like ACD!Irene... 
> 
> _America Windows_ (Also known as _the Chagall Windows_ ) are a set of stained glass windows by the artist Marc Chagall. They live in The Art Institute of Chicago (http://www.artic.edu/exhibition/Chagall). You may have seen them in the movie, _Ferris Bueller's Day Off_ :).
> 
> The song Irene sings on the demo is "D'amour l'ardente flamme" from _La Damnation de Faust_
> 
> This is unbeta'd so it is probably a bit of a mess but... I've been sitting on this for months and if I don't just post it I probably won't ever...
> 
> ***

Those first chords land and he is transported. He can suddenly feel through his socks, his shoes, the hardwood floors of her flat, cool beneath his bare feet. He can see the sunlight filtering in through the sheer curtains that turned her skin cobalt blue and made him flash on one of the postcards tacked to her wall... the Chagall... It makes his heart convulse, his breath stutter, his knees shake until he thinks he might fall and Watson doesn't know the unmarked CD she has just slipped into the stereo is one of those triggers she used to natter on about. She doesn't know the effort it is taking in this moment to remember _blue_ , to cling to the blue of her skin, the sunlight, the hardwood floor and her hand on his face instead of that violent burning red he almost drowned in, that he always thinks of when he thinks of her now. 

He retrieved Watson from the opera and he thought _blood_.

Watson said her name and he thought _blood_.  

He destroyed her letters and thought _blood_. 

We were quite close _blood_

Seven months _blood_

Quite smitten _blood_

 _“You were in love...”_ Watson had said it out loud and there was a moment, a split second of her looking down at him, of her pressing her lips to the inside of his wrist... Chagall-blue skin... and then that tidal wave of red because _M_...

Without murder and torture to serve as a balm, there had been heroin. There had been coke. And then more heroin...

But things are different now. He... he has a measure of control over these things now... these triggers... Rhys proved that. Watson showed him how. So he doesn't run to the stereo. Doesn't break the disc in half like he had meant to do when he realized he had not left it behind with her letters. He doesn’t throw Watson’s companionship away. He breathes through it, he breathes deep, he looks at Watson, her fingers lithe and long turning the dial up just a tad and he lets go of the blood, he lets go of the insistent memory of it, the shape of it on the floor, he lets it be blue, he lets her memory be the _blue_ one and he listens as she begins, her voice, that _voice_ that drew him to her, that started all of it filling the brownstone.

_“D'amour l'ardente flamme,  
Consume mes beaux jours...”_

Watson sips her tea, the lock falls open in his palm and he closes his eyes, he makes himself remember the beginning and not the end, not the end, not the end...

She was understudying at the Royal Opera House, and on the very night he had decided on a whim to purchase a ticket after over 15 years of pointed disinterest, “Mimi” had fallen prey to a particularly vicious bout of food poisoning and she went on.

He waited for her at the stage door after, called her name, as she passed, _“Miss Adler”_. He told her she was extraordinary and that he hoped whatever had prevented Miss Delavane from performing that night was semi-permanent so that he might enjoy her again tomorrow.

She asked if he might like to get a drink in the meantime and he had said, yes, he would...  
 _  
He likes very much the hard vowels of her accent, the way she watches him just as intently as he does her with a directness he’s found true of most Americans. He likes the way she holds her cigarette still and close to her lips instead of employing the fluid gestures her performance had suggested were intrinsic to her. But of course, that was on the stage. That was a completely different woman than the one who sits before him in this tiny cafe, remnants of stage make up smeared just a little under her left eye making her look slightly bruised, delicate, though he can tell from the musculature of her body, the sheer force of her performance this evening alone, that she is not._

_When the cheque arrives she leans over the table just a little bit, admits as though she is giving something away that she is buzzing under her skin..._

_"I'll probably be awake for hours."_

_She sits back in her seat and takes a long drag._

_He images that skin buzzing under his and quickly pays the cheque._  
  
He walked her home, admitted along the way that he hadn’t set foot in the Opera House in over a decade out of spite and she had laughed, low and husky for a soprano, and he had liked that sound as well. He went on to say that he was glad that he had followed the impulse to take a left onto Bow Street instead of his usual shortcut to the tube that evening.

He stood before her, his own skin alight and waiting for her to invite him in, bouncing on his heels the slightest bit and already nearly ready. Already imagining tracing the lines the boning of her costume's corset may have left imprinted onto her abdomen with his fingers, with his tongue.  
  
 _“I can comp you tomorrow if you’d like,” she says and lets the door swing shut behind her leaving him alone on the sidewalk..._  
  
She dressed entirely differently almost every time he saw her. One day, the clean sophisticated lines of a linen shift dress and heels that made her tower over him, the next a ripped t-shirt and a pair of cutoffs with snagged tights and kicks that put her eyes level with his mouth. Sometimes make up, sometimes not. Never jewelry and he clung to that (unintentional?) bit of consistency.

On their sixth night she had her key in the lock when he asked if she might have a recording of herself she’d be willing to part with. She told him she had a demo that she could burn to a disc if he wanted to come by in the morning and he had to stop himself from asking if he might come up now, desperate to see where she lived, certain it would reveal which version of herself was true, because it never occurred to him that they all were. He knew this was for his benefit, the costumes, the playlists on her ipod that he’d perused on two separate occasions when she’d left their table that were tailored to whatever persona she had decided on that night. He knew she was enjoying his curiosity, his interest. His frustration.

It was burlesque, their conversations. She'd tease at a reveal and know just when to stop, just when he was on the verge of determining if she had answered his question truthfully or just said what she knew he'd prefer to hear or how this or that version of herself would answer.

He had to make himself wait until mid-morning to ring her. She didn’t pick up until seconds before it went to voicemail and when she did, she didn’t say a word. She made him speak first.  
  
 _“Irene...”_

_“Ah. We’ve moved past “Miss Adler” then?”_

_“If you like.”_

_“I do.” A pause and then, “How soon can you be here.”_

_“I’m downstairs.”_  
  
She answered the door in grey leggings and a silk chemise that she had slept in, eyeliner left over from the night before, but slightly touched up, and for the first time a necklace, a long thin plain silver chain curving in an arc below her sternum and he was completely lost.

He followed her inside, leaving his shoes with hers at the door as he crossed the threshold into her sanctuary struck by the bareness of the room, the only burst of colour a collage of art postcards surrounding a map with pins marking where she’d been on tour, and blue blue curtains that echoed her eyes and splashed colour across the floor. The furniture all from the consignment shop around the corner in varying shades of cream and grey ( _the sheath dress, then?_ ) and a bookshelf filled with as many CDs as books, no seeming order, haphazard in topic and display, except for the bottom shelf packed tight with only records - The Pixies pressed against Nina Simone, Count Basie next to Nirvana, _Exile on Main Street_ sitting in her record player, the sleeve sleeping against the machine pinned there by a pair of studded stilettos resting on top of Beck’s _Odelay_. ( _The ripped fishnets, then? the t-shirt with the strategic tears, glimpses of skin underneath..._ ) _  
_  
 _“Sit”, she murmurs, nodding at the couch, and he does even though he wants to plant himself in front of that bookshelf and run his fingers over her details and memorize, catalogue, present her with a biography he didn’t get from a program or their cafe cabaret..._  
  
 _She sits down on the floor at his feet, her laptop cradled in her arms and he looks at her, at the twists of her hair piled loosely atop her head, tinged almost purple by that filtered light and the long column of her neck, the chain glittering across the insistent paleness of her summer skin and he gives in to it, he lets himself get distracted, lets himself be attracted to her physically, something he’s mostly ignored since that first night because she’s proven to be so much more interesting than that._  
  
 _She looks up after clicking play, she meets his eyes and he looks away quickly, turning his attention to the collage of postcards on the wall before him - several from MoMa, a few more from the Art Institute of Chicago clustered around that Chagall, a handful from the Louvre and the Portrait Gallery - he matches them to the pins in the map and he feels like a teenager and he’s never felt like a teenager even when he was one and then the palm of her hand suddenly cradling his jaw, making him look at her, but placing her hand gently over his eyes when he does._  
  
 _He opens his mouth to speak and then her fingers there resting lightly against his lips and “shhh...” as the music begins, a simple piano and her voice, her voice laid bare and vibrating around him in this precisely cluttered corner of a room, the hardwood floor cool under his bare feet, her fingers warm against his mouth._  
  
 _“This is where I am,” she says, softly, “this is me...”_  
  
 _And she takes her hand away then, but leaves her fingertips resting against his parted lips, his eyes still closed and listening and feeling the breeze against his bare forearms, the caress of the shear curtains against his foot with a sudden gust, and her voice, her voice filling the room unadorned and beautiful, and her fingertips tracing his lips now, pausing at the touch of his tongue and he still hasn’t opened his eyes as he turns his head until his lips are at her palm and he kisses her there._  
  
 _Her hips between his knees, her voice in his ears, and he kisses, he tastes with his hands resting on his thighs and the song ends and she takes her hand away. She sits back on her heels and he opens his eyes and she is looking right into his and she doesn’t kiss him, doesn’t touch him again but he knows she wants to because he had felt her pulse under his tongue and her pupils..._  
  
 _She turns away, busies herself with ejecting the disc from her laptop and finding an envelope for it as he stands, as he goes to the collage and studies it up close, waiting to be dismissed or called back, or anything that she wants, really._  
  
 _She comes up behind him as his gaze lands once again upon the Chagall and after a moment, “I don’t really do this.”_  
  
 _“Do what?”_  
  
 _“What it is we’re going to do.”_  
  
 _“Sex?”_  
  
 _“More than that. I don’t do more than that.”  
_  
 _“Nor I.”_  
  
 _"Then this will be interesting then."_  
  
 _"Agreed."_  
  
 _He turns to face her and he doesn’t touch her until she touches him first and when she does they don’t stop and he looks at her skin as naked as her voice and the drapes throwing dashes of blue light across her cheek, her shoulder, her breast, her hip._  
  
 _She whispers things in his ear as they move, gasps things he knows in his gut to be true and he had been wrong about several of them and he finds he likes that.  She presses her mouth to the scar on the inside of his wrist nearly hidden beneath a tattoo, echoing his first kiss, and murmurs against it when he comes to a rest inside her, "I like that... that's who you are, isn't it..." and he traces the blue shapes on her skin and says, "you look like **America Windows** " and she, “Maybe I'll take you to Chicago someday...”_  
  
 _“And New Jersey,” he says and she shakes her head, "New York. You'd like New York..."_  
  
"Sherlock..." the lock he had been working on clatters to the table and he blinks to find Watson standing before him, looking concerned in a way she hasn't in weeks. "You zoned out for a bit there..."

"Did you say something?"

She pauses and he doesn't like how careful she's being. They've moved past this. 

"I said I thought you hated the opera..."

He picks up the lock, puts it with the others.

"No..." his voice is strained and less than a year ago he'd have been angry at himself for it. "Quite the opposite really..."

"I don't recognize the singer," she says, consciously trying to lighten her tone and he doesn't know what he wants from her. She turns away with her mug towards the kitchen and says, "It sounds like a demo-"

"It is. It's Irene's." He swallows, turns to look at her. "It's Irene. She... was talented, wasn't she?"

"...Yes. Very."

"I never told you how we met, did I?"

And Watson says, No. She sets her mug down on the table and sits down across from him. She says, "I'd like to hear if you'd like to tell me..."

And he nods. He nods and he sits down as well.

And he says


End file.
